While The Cats Away, The Mice Will Play

Sorry that I just sort of disappeared.  The hubby was out of town all last week and I decided to take advantage and get a few projects checked off my list.  But first, the weekend before Andrew left he helped me to demo the laundry room.  Yay!  That means my laundry room has to actually get done now... we can't just talk about it anymore.  Of course since he was heading out of town and the laundry room only got torn apart, the house was left in major disaster mode.  We've tried cleaning up a little bit, but the guest room and bath have been taken over by laundry stuff.  Not such a big deal, except for the fact that my sister and her fiance were visiting last weekend.  Hehe... sorry Caitlin.
Anyways... back to the projects... the minute Andrew left for the airport, I headed down to the basement and started moving furniture to the middle of the room.  That's right, the toy room finally got painted.  I'm not even sure that I mentioned the toy room had been moved to the basement in June, but we, and by we I mean I, decided we needed to utilize some spaces better in our home.  The basement wasn't being used at all except as a large storage dumping ground and we were always climbing over our guests down there to get to anything including the food storage room.  Since we have visitors a lot, it was kind of a big deal.  So the guest room got moved to the old toy room on the main level, which has worked out much better and the toy room went downstairs.  It really has been win win.  Unfortunately, I didn't have time or energy to decorate the toy room, but just getting it painted and the furniture arranged was a huge undertaking in and of itself.  So without further ado... here is what we have so far...

 This was in June when we were moving stuff around.

 Freshly painted... I love the color.

 Unfortunately, the lovely pink carpet stands out that much more now.

 The file cabinets in the corner of the picture here actually need to go in the storage room, but that room has to be addressed before there is room for these file cabinets.

 The kids spend hours cooking food in their kitchen... it makes me happy.  They also love to race those strollers.

 Nice and organized... I just need to make up labels.

 They also love the chalk board and their table.  I found this table with the four chairs at the DI for $35 a couple summers ago.  Score!  Unfortunately, three of the chairs have been broken... I'm still hoping to be able to fix them though.  I think it would be cute to paint the chairs some fun colors.

And of course, the horse, the very fancy horse.

Once the toy room was done, I moved onto the laundry room.  I'm convinced that the previous owners really liked to put holes in the wall.  They were also really big fans of wall anchors (I kid you not, there were wall anchors for small picture frames) and toggle bolts (oh please shoot me).  The laundry room was no exception, in fact I'm pretty sure this was the favorite room for this.  I don't even know how many holes I patched, but it was a lot.  After I finally got everything patched and sanded and patched and sanded again, I was able to paint before Andrew got home Friday night.  Now we just need to get the new shelves built and installed and then I can decorate.  I'm so excited to have a nice laundry room.

 One of the few times the laundry room has been clean and organized.

 These pictures are actually two years old... I forgot to take pictures before we started tearing things out.  The room was actually a huge disaster before we started and the washer and dryer had been buried for at least two months... when I did laundry I just moved the huge pile to the couch and brought it back to the washer when I was done.   Yes, that is embarrassing to admit.  We're working on it.  Don't judge. 

 Cameron enjoyed helping.

 Just imagine all the holes from that shelving unit... half of which were in toggle bolts.

 Ella thought it was pretty cool that she could touch the roof.

 It was so hard to find a paint color for this room.  Everything looks like some variation of concrete on the walls.

I think I'm happy with the color.  It's certainly better than the yellow that was in there.  I also got a new light fixture for in here.  I'm excited for this to be done.  Hopefully everything gets finished up on Saturday.